The portal giveth, and the portal taketh away.

Right now, the Lady Vols have had two players enter the transfer portal in Avery Strickland and Favor Ayodele in stories that can be read HERE and HERE.

The giving side of the portal is still to come, but the Lady Vols seem likely to add one or two players with scoring guard and agile forward atop the list. Several players are on Tennessee’s radar – the Lady Vols operate under the radar as well as anyone – so it’s probably a matter of time.

The basketball portal is quite full with more than 2,000 players on the men’s side and more than 1,300 for the women. Player movement is to be expected as is the usual fan swing of dismay when it’s one of theirs leaving and elation when another player arrives.

A year ago, coach Kim Caldwell and her staff added five players from the portal to bolster a roster – Tennessee had just one freshman signed – for her fast tempo style. The landscape looks a lot different in 2025. Five freshmen will be on campus soon, including three McDonald’s All-Americans, in a highly ranked class.

Two of those freshmen, Jaida Civil, a 6-0 guard from Vero Beach, Florida, and Deniya Prawl, a 6-2 wing from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, became known as the Lambo kids after assistant coach Gabe Lazo arranged for Lamborghinis to be on the court as a prop – apropos considering the speed of Caldwell’s style – and the recruits took photos while on their visit last fall.

Incoming Lady Vols freshman Deniya Prawl took a seat in a Lamborghini on her recruiting visit. (Photo from social media)

Tennessee needs to select a couple of needed pieces from the portal, not revamp the roster. With the departure of Jewel Spear (77), Samara Spencer (66) and Tess Darby (58), who combined for 201 three-pointers in their final season of college basketball and led Tennessee in accuracy from the arc, the Lady Vols need to add a deep threat.

Plenty of talent returns, too, in senior guard Ruby Whitehorn, senior forward Zee Spearman and junior forward Alyssa Latham – all three were part of the portal haul a year ago – along with leading scorer Talaysia Cooper, who will be a junior this coming season. Senior Kaiya Wynn will return from an Achilles tear after missing all of the 2024-25 season and is tailor-made for Caldwell’s system with her speed and ability to sit down and defend one-on-one.

Alyssa Latham competes in the game against Florida State in the 2024-25 season. (Kate Luffman/Tennessee Athletics)

Freshman Kaniya Boyd showed the spotlight wasn’t too big at Tennessee despite her age. She enrolled early at Tennessee in January 2024 to rehab a knee injury at the age of 17. When Caldwell was hired, she chose to stay and became a vital piece this season with Caldwell calling her “the future of the program.”

It is always advisable to allow freshmen time to acclimate, and the same applies to the incoming class of Civil, Prawl, Lauren Hurst, a 6-2 wing from Cleveland, Tennessee, and Mia Pauldo and Mya Pauldo, twin 5-5 guards from Paterson, New Jersey.

But the youngsters are talented enough to compete – Civil, Mia Pauldo and Prawl earned the All-American status, while Mya Pauldo and Hurst were nominees from their respective states – and will have every opportunity to compete for playing time.

The Lady Vols just completed a successful 24-10 season with a run to the Sweet 16 and a final ranking of No. 15 by AP.

A very early preseason top 25 poll has been released by ESPN with Tennessee landing at No. 8. The AP and USA Today polls are the ones that set the tone – and those don’t come until fall – but the Lady Vols are unlikely to start the 2025-26 season outside of the top 25 as they did in 2024-25.

While a top 10 spot says a lot, so does the fact that four SEC teams are above Tennessee in South Carolina, No. 2; Texas, No. 4; LSU, No. 6; and Oklahoma, No. 7. That is how stacked the SEC will be yet again.

Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press.